How to Integrate into Your CRM or Transaction System

Written by Jacqueline Broussard Updated over a week ago

Integrating Your Reach150 Deployment with Your CRM or Transaction System

If you already use a CRM or transaction system to send follow-up emails to your customers, we make it even easier for your customer-facing employees to collect recommendations from your customers. By integrating your Reach150 deployment with your CRM or transaction system, you can ensure 100% participation from your customer-facing employees, as it eliminates the need for them to keep making recommendation requests via the Reach150 web interface. Your CRM or transaction system can be set up to send recommendation requests automatically after every transaction, or it can be set up to send recommendation requests manually via the CRM on a case-by-case basis.

Requirements

CRM and Transaction integration is available to all Reach150 Business accounts. There’s no extra fee involved. All you need is a CRM or transaction system that allows you to send emails to your customers using user- defined email templates, with the ability to include the employee’s name, employee’s email address, the customer’s name, and the customer’s email address as tags within the email template.

Email Template

We suggest an email template as described below. Simplicity allows a quick decision by your customer to make a recommendation.

Hello [CUSTOMER_NAME],This is [EMPLOYEE_NAME] at [COMPANY_NAME] and I have a quick favor to ask of you. If you think I've done good work for you, please consider writing me a recommendation that I can share online. You will not need to create an account.Write a recommendationI'd be personally grateful for the effort.Thanks,[EMPLOYEE_NAME][COMPANY_NAME]

Optional: you can pass in the first name, last name, or full name of the person from whom you are requesting a recommendation. You can also specify their job title and company.

First name: fn=[FIRST_NAME]

Last name: ln=[LAST_NAME]

Full name: un=[FULL_NAME]

Job title: jt=[JOB_TITLE]

Company: cn=[COMPANY_NAME] (this doesn't apply for organizations whose employees are set business users)

First name, last name example: fn=Han&ln=SoloFull name example: un=Han+Solo

Here's an example:

Write a recommendation

Note:

You will need to replace [CUSTOMER_NAME], [EMPLOYEE_EMAIL], [CUSTOMER_EMAIL], and [EMPLOYEE_NAME] with appropriate tags used by your CRM’s or transaction system templating system. For example, they might be [SenderEmail], [RecipientEmail], etc.

You will also need to replace [REACH150_CRM_CODE] with a unique ID that was assigned to you by Reach150. If you do not already have one, please request one from support@reach150.com. Also, for multiple office support, you will need a unique ID per office (make sure to specify that when contacting support).

Considerations

Automated versus Manual: You may elect to have the customer-facing employee send the email via the CRM manually on a case-by-case basis. However, we recommend that you configure the CRM so that a recommendation request email is sent to the customer automatically after every transaction. When a recommendation is received, the customer-facing employee is asked to approve the recommendation before it is published. This prevents the automatic publishing of a negative customer response. The customer facing employee still sees the negative feedback privately, giving them the opportunity to follow-up with an unhappy customer and set things straight without direct impact to the employee’s public-facing image.

Dedicated Recommendation Request Email versus Embedded: You may elect to embed a recommendation request with a follow-up email that you already have within the CRM. While this decreases the number of emails sent to the customer, it may also reduce the number of recommendations you receive since the customer may overlook the recommendation request. For that reason, we recommend that you send an email that is dedicated to a recommendation request.

Past Customers versus Current: We suggest that you request recommendations from your past customers to get a pool of recommendations to populate the system quickly. Once you have requested recommendations from your past customers, we suggest you set up automated recommendation request emails to keep the submitted content current. This is important for the visitors who are looking at your recommendations online, as well as getting ranked high on search engine results.